Origami provides a cost-effective framework which is easy to use and maintain, robust, and highly flexible – ensuring quicker delivery of the right answers, and a significant improvement on HPC ROI. Origami was developed to utilise parallel calculation to deliver benefits across any HPC grid environment.

Xifintiq have partnered with NAG – the market leading numerical library and tools provider to investment banking – to launch Origami. NAG's experience in rigorous testing and correctness combined with its respected position in the quant finance community deliver an unrivalled level of service to Origami users. This service includes tailored implementation and installation ensuring users gain maximum benefit from the framework, user training, plus first-line technical support.

Origami puts the power of on-premise, cloud and hybrid infrastructure resources at your fingertips

Origami removes constraints that are inherent in other grid solutions and empowers you to deliver faster solutions

Origami provides a combination of tools that allows the user to quickly set up their own grid, create tasks and start distributing them across your HPC environment. Users can either define their requirements as a series of individual tasks or as linked interdependent tasks.

A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a series of dependent tasks where the dependencies may be non-trivial and there are no circular dependencies. Origami offers a DAG Manager that takes a DAG definition and optimises the distribution of the tasks across the Origami grid, providing both timing and cost metrics alongside the results. The DAG Manager comes with the ability to restart a DAG job, picking up where it previously left off.

For data distribution there is the Hierarchical Group of Vectors (HGV) data format designed to enable programmers to easily and quickly build the data structures they need. HGVs can store labelled scalar, vector and tabular data of different types along with their relationships in a natural, spreadsheet-like fashion. For the web the data can be streamed using compression, to save space and time, and encryption to protect your data in a web friendly way. Also provided is an 'App’ that allows you to visualize and modify your HGV files.

Origami in the cloud is designed to grow with you. You can control how and when tasks are scheduled out of your internal environment into your hosted cloud service, be that Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or Google Cloud. Once your cloud service provider is chosen, configuration is simple. You switch from in-house architecture to cloud by changing your connection string. Origami will estimate the execution time and costs prior to starting any execution and provide full actual metrics and costs upon completion.

For DevOps testing and bespoke HPC work the user can create individual tasks that can be simply sent to the grid.

Robust and highly flexible

Origami can be installed on networked machines to offer an in-house grid, or used as an execution platform with cloud providers. Currently Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud, and with other providers in the future. Once set up, switching from in-house to Cloud is as simple as changing a connection string. Thanks to its integrated runtime metrics Origami provides the ability to predict the required execution time and cost for tasks performed multiple times prior to execution.

Origami can quickly be installed on your local network of machines. Origami maintains one or more queues upon which client applications can place requests. Individual nodes (machines on the grid) can accept tasks from one or more of these queues depending on their specialist hardware (e.g. GPU), compute hardware (multiple cores) or availability (for example dedicated server versus development workstation). The Origami Grid Controller allows monitoring and control of applications running on the grid. As your needs grow, the grid can easily expand to include cloud services. All of this can be accomplished without the need for specialist HPC support personnel.

Services and Support

NAG's Technical Support Service is recognised as excellent within the finance community; together with our Origami partner, Xifintiq, we ensure that technical support for the software is world-class in response and effectiveness. We strongly believe that in order to effectively support complex software the technicians must be both experienced and understand the intricacies of the computational techniques. This conviction is reflected in the composition of the team most of whom are qualified to PhD level and have combined experience of software support in excess of 50 years.

NAG accuracy is quality assured

NAG provides accurate, documented, numerical software and services to help you make sure that your results are accurate. The validity of NAG software is tested for each platform that it is enabled for. Only when an implementation satisfies our stringent accuracy standards is it released. As a result, you can rely on the proven accuracy and reliability of NAG to give you the right answers. NAG is an ISO 9001 certified organization.

Reap the benefits of NAG expertise

The numerical codes that underpin the results from your software are not future proof. While the mathematics does not change, the codes have a limited lifespan because of new hardware structures, mathematical innovation and changes in application needs. NAG Numerical Services help you and your organization find and implement the optimum numerical computation solutions. NAG works with your team to impart skills and techniques that will help solve your numerical software problems.

Expert teaching and instruction from numerical experts

Your users, developers and managers can all benefit from NAG's highly regarded training courses. All of the training courses shown below have been delivered successfully either from NAG offices or at client premises. Training courses can be tailored to suit your particular requirements and be targeted to novice, intermediate or experienced levels. Specialized mentoring and development programs are also available for HPC managers.

Working in collaboration with industry and academia

NAG was founded on collaboration as an inter-University collaborative venture combining the talents of mathematicians and computer scientists. NAG has continued to collaborate with individuals and organizations over the past four decades and today longstanding and new partners are delivering tangible benefits to users and students all over the world.